Unless otherwise indicated herein, the description in this section is not prior art to the claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
There is known an image forming apparatus that performs a raster image processor (RIP) process on reuse data of variable print data including the reuse data, which is a common part of a plurality of printed matters, and variable data, which is a variable part of the respective printed matters, to store in the storage device, and that in generating the respective printed matters executes variable printing that generates an image of the respective printed matters with the superimposed RIP-processed reuse data, which is stored in the storage device, on the variable data, to which the RIP-process was performed in generating the respective printed matters. An image forming apparatus includes a main storage device and an auxiliary storage device with a lower access speed than the main storage device as a storage device. Then, the image forming apparatus stores the RIP-processed reuse data in the auxiliary storage device when the RIP-processed reuse data has a size larger than the free space of the main storage device.